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This special edition slipcased package contains Paul Kelly's
much-anticipated memoir How To Make Gravy along with the
companion A-Z Recordings box set, which includes eight CDs
of new live recordings of the songs that form the book's chapters,
stripped back to their essentials as mesmerising solo or duo
performances. The box set also features a 64-page booklet of colour
photographs.

How To Make Gravy has its genesis in a series of concerts
first staged in 2004. Over four nights Paul Kelly performed, in
alphabetical order, one hundred of his songs from the previous
three decades. In between songs he told stories about them, and from
those little tales grew How to Make Gravy, a memoir like no
other. Each of its hundred chapters, also in alphabetical order by song
title, consists of lyrics followed by a story, the nature of the latter
taking its cue from the former. Some pieces are confessional, some tell
Kelly's personal and family history, some take you on a road tour
with the band, some form an idiosyncratic history of popular
music, some are like small essays, some stand as a kind of how-to of
the songwriter's art – from the point of inspiration to writing,
honing, collaborating, performing, recording and reworking.

Paul Kelly is a born storyteller. Give him two verses with a chorus
or 550 pages, but he won't waste a word. How to Make Gravy is a
long volume that's as tight as a three-piece band. There isn't a topic
this man can't turn his pen to – contemporary music and the people who
play it, football, cricket, literature, opera, social issues, love,
loss, poetry, the land and the history of Australia … there are even
quizzes. The writing is insightful, funny, honest, compassionate,
intelligent, playful, erudite, warm, thought-provoking. Paul Kelly is a
star with zero pretensions, an everyman who is also a renaissance man.
He thinks and loves and travels and reads widely, and his musical
memoir is destined to become a classic – it doesn't have a bum note on
it.

About The Author

Paul Kelly is recognised as one of the most significant
singer/songwriters in the country. As well as issuing an enduring body
of work both solo and with his bands, including The Dots, The Coloured
Girls and The Messengers, Kelly has written film scores (Lantana and
Jindabyne), and produced albums for and written songs with some
of Australia and New Zealand's finest artists. He was inducted into the
Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA) Hall of Fame in 1997
and had two songs included in the Australasian Performing Rights
Association's (APRA) 2001 list of the Top 30 Australian songs of all
time -- 'To Her Door' and 'Treaty' (written with Yothu Yindi). His hits
also include 'Dumb Things' and the classic 'From Little Things Big
Things Grow' (with Kev Carmody). His most recent album was Stolen
Apples.